There has been much ado about the recently concluded Copenhagen Climate Accord. Through this biggest gathering of world leaders in the history of United Nations it was being hoped that the world will move from the non-binding statements of Kyoto towards perhaps, a more meaningful and committed dialogue for creating a blueprint for change. However, what has resulted instead is a political maneuver for a deferred action. What is strikingly strange though is to see that in spite of the awareness towards the greatest threat that humanity faces and the associated costs of not acting soon, the Accord couldn’t overcome the bi-polarization that we find ourselves in, between the developed and the developing world (the new economic powerhouse, BASIC: Brazil, South Africa, India and China).
Discord in the BASIC Targets
Individual voluntary targets were announced by the BASIC nations for reducing the energy intensities of their economic growth. While China announced a target of 40-45 percent reduction in the emission intensity compared to 2005 levels by 2020, India went ahead with a target of 20-25 percent. However, setting of such individual targets has not really been taken in as sacrosanct and instead has formed a mere basis for a template for future negotiations.
Highlights of the Deal
The deal, however, has been able to reach to some consensus on the following points:
A global goal to reduce worldwide emissions by 50 percent by mid-century
v Developed countries to set their emission targets by February 2010 and developing countries to list their actions
v Adherence to targets by developed countries would be subject to international monitoring
v Actions of developing countries supported by external assistance would be subject to external monitoring and verification
v Actions of developing countries supported locally shall be monitored and verified locally in accordance with international consultations and analysis without impinging on the sovereignty of nations
v Long term funding to the tune of $100 million per year by 2020 and making available $10 million per year for short-term funding from 2010 to the poorest and the most vulnerable to climate change and
v A review of the overall agreement in 2006
So, while the US has undoubtedly been able to maneuver its way out unscathed with no targets being imposed on it from outside, it has also been able to put BASIC in line with the developed countries by accepting a climate discipline. However, the Accord also finds the BASIC as a contended lot as they have been able to retain the “differentiated responsibility” without much damage to their long-term energy plans and independence from outside agencies observant of their self-regulated actions.
The Developed nations, who have been historically responsible for the climate change and the world that we find ourselves in today, have offered the Developing nations a financial assistance of up to $100 billion annually by 2020, with priority to the vulnerable nations. However, there’s no guarantee that the Copenhagen Accord will even be implemented as it has not been formally adopted by the Conference of Parties (COP).
While China has been painted as the biggest hurdle to a comprehensive agreement, it cannot be overlooked that despite the fact that the US is the biggest polluter per capita in the world, it has to date only offered emission cuts of a paltry 3 percent based on 1990 levels. China, like India and Brazil still emits a relatively small proportion and millions of its citizens continue to live in poverty.
Thus, just as Greenpeace makes a point, living standards need not be compromised. Small steps like increased focus on energy efficiency, better use of renewable resources of energy, trimming of the hefty $250 billion annual subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, innovations in design etc. can perhaps go a long way in making renewable energy cheaper than the conventional energy and thus reduce our carbon footprint.
We might have a Plan B for everything but just as the demonstrators on the streets of Copenhagen had upheld, there is no Planet B. The planet cannot be overlooked on the pretext of advancing out national aspirations and commercial interests. So while the Copenhagen Accord may have been useful for taking notes for future parleys, it hasn’t yet been significant, as it was touted to be, in enforcing a legally binding mechanism upon the nations for preventing climate change and the apocalypse that faces humanity. It is therefore imperative and crucial that the developed countries pledge deep emission cuts within a month and sign a legally binding pact at the climate change talks in Bonn.
4 comments:
Did not know about this blog! It is amazing! Well as far as Plan B and Planet B is concerned, to America prevention is not better than cure. That is why it is laying too much emphasis on discovering life supporting environment in mars or moon! Well jokes apart now.
With this failure, we stand on the danger of getting into a deadlock for organizing successful talks on climate change. Plz find time to read the following which has been copied from http://www.opendemocracy.net/simon-zadek/learn-from-copenhagens-failure
Tomorrow’s history is rarely created by extraordinary moments, it is merely punctuated by them.
Copenhagen will be seen as a failure of vision, leadership, and compassion. The Copenhagen Accord, ‘noted’ in extra time at COP15, will be stuck with the Sudanese’s naming as a “suicide pact”. And President’s Obama, Hu and many others, however they speak to their domestic constituencies, will have been party to this failed attempt to strike an ambitious deal.
Seeking consensus between 193 sovereign states through a zero-sum negotiation process was always going to be a fool’s errand. It failed because it handed exclusive rights to national governments, leaving 99% of the energy of business, civil society, cities, and the youth (just to same a few) as frustrated bystanders (see them in my Walk through Babylon). It failed because it sought to secure a “one for all, and all for one” consensus, unworkable even in the relatively simple world of trade. It failed, finally, because of its use of old style negotiation techniques where we have learnt so much from the “deliberative” approaches of communities and business in envisioning change and creating unlikely pathways to achieving it.
For Copenhagen to serve us well, we must learn from it.
It has failed because our global commons can no longer be managed by top-down, government-led, compliance focused, publicly-funded agreements between nations. Presidents and prime ministers, along with legions of negotiators, have been complicit in this by playing, frankly, their well-defined allotted roles in appealing to their domestic political constituencies (accountability) and in seeking re-election (whether in democracies or not). Who can blame folks for doing what we ask them to do, even if in the last hours we demand that they shift gear and behave as if they were chosen to lead in saving the global commons (which they were decidedly not).
Two things need to, and can happen now.
The first of course is to deal with climate with the right people where the action is. Whilst not wishing to trivialize today’s pain, we can deal with climate more effectively by catalyzing ambitious national action leveraged with international co-operation. We can get a better global deal, but only once nation’s have whetted their appetite for low carbon growth and development through action, not theory. This is not, as i have repeatedly argued, downgrading expectations, but upgrading them by leveraging where the real energy for change lies, and then uploading the results into a far smarter global deal going forward ( see my Revising Plan A).
Second concerns our global governance arrangements. Reforming global governance has been an esoteric topic for many years pursued by policy analysts, academics and international bureaucrats offering unintelligible diagnostics and incremental and largely technocratic recommendations. Copenhagen, and its potentially ghastly implications, makes this obscurity unacceptable. In the last two decades we have in fact already invented far more effective ways to do business internationally, from how we do global health through public private partnerships to building the hadron collider in CERN (it works now, but the amazing thing about it is how the global scientific and political community made it happen, not merely that it is ‘about the origins of everything’). We do not need another Commission made up of those who have presided over our failing global institutions, we need fresh blood and urgency in surfacing today’s institutional innovations and working out how to make these work in practice.
For Copenhagen to serve us well, we must learn from it.
It has failed because our global commons can no longer be managed by top-down, government-led, compliance focused, publicly-funded agreements between nations. Presidents and prime ministers, along with legions of negotiators, have been complicit in this by playing, frankly, their well-defined allotted roles in appealing to their domestic political constituencies (accountability) and in seeking re-election (whether in democracies or not). Who can blame folks for doing what we ask them to do, even if in the last hours we demand that they shift gear and behave as if they were chosen to lead in saving the global commons (which they were decidedly not).
COP15’s real legacy.
Coming back, then, to climate. We should surely be disappointed by the final deal. But we are now poised to have to invent an alternative pathway in moving forward. John Maynard Keynes, the most extraordinary 20th century economist, argued that ‘our challenge is not to invent new ideas, but rather to let go of old ones’. Well, if he was right, and i suspect he was, then COP15’s greatest contribution to the public good may be to bury, once and for all, our outmoded ways of doing global governance. Such an achievement, whilst sad to contemplate today, may turn out in tomorrow’s history to be an extraodinarily important legacy that served us and our children well in decades to come.
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